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Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, has his photograph adorning one of the walls in my work-space. Yes, my mother is there somewhere in the background among the crowd, I not being totally unsentimental. Thoth, however, is front and centre. You, dear reader, are also likely happy that he gave us the gift of literacy. But not us at all. No, the gift of literacy was not meant for mere common folks like us, it was reserved for priests, and that until only recently, till the time of Martin Luther, Johan Gutenberg, and especially John Wesley. Most of us don't take seriously the significance of our right to read and write. Most of us have never lived in an obscurantist state of primitive fascists who kill those who question their limited view of reality and the authority they base it on. Read a book; ask a question; get murdered. It ain't the American way. It is the way of fascism, Left, Right, or Muslim. We see the evidence of it in small ways to date in the West, the hatred and violence directed at those who question authority of the powers as they are: in the West we have obscurantists at wikipedia and indymedia and chock-a-block at our universities; there are book-burners lurking everywhere at Stormfront and associated sites, those who would, as Heine points out, begin by burning books, and who would end burning people; and there is Islam. We in the West take for granted that we should be sensitive to the feelings of others in our speech; that we shouldn't read things that might give us bad ideas about some members of our general societies; that we shouldn't read hate sites like-- well, no dhimmitude, for example. We give back to the mystic priests, the gnostics, our right to read, tossing over our gift from Thoth to those who would rule us arbitrarily. We don't do this all of a rush, we do it incrementally, nodding when we hear from others that "hate speech is not free speech." We do so when we listen to those who quote Chomsky and when we say nothing about the drivel they speak. We give up our freedom to read and think about our world and our lives as individuals when we put up with rubbish cliches from dilettante Leftists who shriek: "Give back to the community." I look at Thoth, and I see him wink at me.

Thursday evenings we meet at the Vancouver Public Library in the atrium from 7-9:00 pm to sit and discuss the nature of our relationship to our nations and our course of action to make our lives freer and more fulfilling than they will be if we do nothing more than nothing, allowing the creeping fascism of the Left to continue its work with fascist Islam to curtail and eventually destroy our right to read and to think and to speak freely. To do nothing to resist the fascism of the Left and Islam is to aid them in their quest to destroy our individualist nations, to draw a veil over the minds of the people, to enslave the world and turn all into farm animals tended by the gnostic elites of the dead past still jerking and kicking in our present time. We will be ruled by the dead if we do nothing more than nothing. I read this in the eyes of Thoth.

Plato writes that Socrates said in the Phaedrus that we should not read but that we should rely on our memories to have information and the voices of the far away and the dead in our minds. Socrates, writes Plato, condemns Thoth. He is not the only one; and in our day, more and more join his chorus.

Gutenberg took the books of our world out of the stained hands of the monastic scribes and put them into the hands of the people, most of whom couldn't read. For those who could, who could read English, "Tynedale (sometimes spelled Tindale or Tindall) (circa 1494 - October 6, 1536) was a 16th century religious reformer and scholar who translated the Bible into the Early Modern English of his day. Although numerous partial and complete English translations had been made from the 7th century onward, Tyndale's was the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. In 1535 Tyndale was tried for heresy and treason and then strangled and burnt at the stake," [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale], tried to make available a Bible commoners could read by themselves without intercession by priests. Of course, for his efforts he was murdered. We, to a lesser extent, meeting as we do on Thursday evenings in the public library, face a similar threat. We are nearing our first full year of weekly meetings. We carry on, as did Tynedale. We discuss books and ideas.

We read that the Muslim conquest was a great benefit to the West, one reason being the introduction to Europe of paper. "Although it was the Arabs who introduced paper into Europe in the 8th century (after learning how to manufacture it from the Chinese when they captured Samarkand in 704) they rejected mechanical book printing for centuries because it was an infidel invention unsanctioned by Allah." (Peter Mansfield, The Arabs, p. 117.) Bernard Lewis, an apologist for the Turks, as a rule, writes; "The Turkish printing press, which flourished in the first half of the 18th century, printed in all 17 books...." (Lewis, 2001: p. 140.) He also writes: "Islam's first printing press was introduced in 1728. Started by Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian seminarist in Turkey." (ibid; p. 28.) Mansfield writes, p.157, that he "Had to close his shop in 1745. Mullahs prohibited printing presses." Why," you ask, dear reader? "Printing presses were banned on the grounds that the word "Allah" could be composed in type that would be cleaned of ink by a brush that could contain pig bristles." (Boorstin, 1985: pp. 543-547.) The printing press came to Egypt in 1798 when Napoleon brought one to Alexandria to use as a propaganda organ. "The first Turkish newspaper, The Monitor, published on May 14, 1832, became almost immediately a government mouthpiece." (Lewis, 2001.)

Thoth tells me this is William Bullock's birthday. Maybe I even read it somewhere. Bullock is one of the many heroes of our Modern world most of us have rightly never heard of or read about. He invented the off-set printing press, an invention that makes possible cheap books for peasants like me. I don't have to be a baron to buy a psalter from the monastery. I don't have to be an illiterate fellah listening to the muezzin shrieking: "Death to Israel! Death to America!" to get my news of the day and my received opinions of the world I live in and my place in it. No, thanks to Thoth and Bullock and numerous others I can sit at the library and discuss with friends the nature of things as I understand them from years of living in a world of free literacy. And I can value this experience from having spent years in places where knowledge is restricted to the elite who guard it so jealously that they murder those who challenge them for its possession.

Books are worthless if there are too few of them and if they're too dear to have. Ideas and opinions are equally worthless if you're afraid to express them and discuss them in public. William Bullock gave us a gift almost as important as that from Thoth. Share it with us, you stingy bastard. Join us at the library, or go to the library near you and invite your friends to discuss the nature of our struggle against jihad and Left dhimmi fascism, two evil forces that will first burn our books and later us as well.
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William Bullock (1813–April 12, 1867) was an American inventor whose 1863 invention of the web rotary printing press helped revolutionize the printing industry due to its great speed and efficiency. A few years after his invention, Bullock was accidentally killed by his own web rotary press.

Bullock was born in Greenville, New York in 1813. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by his brother. In his youth, he worked with his brother as a machinist and iron-founder, and his fascination with books led him to acquire much knowledge of mechanics. At age 21, he was running his own machinery shop in Savannah, Georgia. At this time, Bullock invented a shingle-cutting machine, but his business went broke when he was unable to market it.

Bullock returned to New York and designed such devices as a cotton and hay press, a seed planter, and a lathe cutting machine. He also invented a grain drill, which won him a prize from the Franklin Institute in 1849. Shortly after this, he became involved in the newspaper world, and began working as and editor for a Philadelphia newspaper, The Banner of the Union.

The paper later moved to Catskill, New York, and in 1853, he began working on a hand-turned wooding printing press that had a self-feeder, an idea that laid the foundation for his later presses. One of which he designed in 1860 for the national publication Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly.

In 1860 Bullock moved to Pittsburgh, and in a couple of years, perfected a printing press called the web rotary press. Richard March Hoe had invented the rotary press in the 1840s, but Bullock's press was an improvement over Hoe's design. Bullock's press allowed for continuous large rolls of paper to be automatically fed through the rollers, eliminating the laborious hand feeding system of earlier presses. The press was self-adjusting, printed on both sides, folded the paper, and a sharp serrated knife that rarely needed sharpening cut sheets with rapid precision. The press could print up to 12,000 sheets an hour, and later improvement had the figure up to 30,000 sheets an hour.

In a bizarre accident, Bullock was killed by his own invention. On April 3, 1867, he was making adjustments to one of his new presses that was being installed for the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper. Bullock tried to kick a driving belt onto a pulley, when his leg became caught in the machine. His leg was crushed and broken, and after a few days, gangrene set in. On April 12, 1867, Bullock died during an operation to amputate the leg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bullock_(inventor)
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Thursday evening, 7-9:00 pm. VPL atrium. We sit by Blenz coffee bar wearing blue scarves. Join us.